Her words were so softly spoken that they seemed to melt away. She leaned forward to look in his face.
"Sophy," he begged, with sudden and almost passionate earnestness, "be kind to me, please! I am just a simple, stupid countryman, who feels as if he had lost his way. I have lived a solitary sort of life—an unnatural one, you would say—and I've been brought up with some old-fashioned ideas. I know they are old-fashioned, but I can't throw them overboard all at once. I have kept away from this sort of thing. I didn't think it would ever attract me—I suppose because I didn't believe it could be made so attractive. I have suddenly found out—that it does!"
"What are you going to do?" she whispered.
"There is only one thing for me to do," he answered. "Until I know what I have come to London to learn, I shall fight against it."
"You mean about Louise?"
"I mean about Louise," he said gravely.
Sophy came still closer to him. Her voice was as soft as the lightest, finest note of music, trembling a little with that one thread of passion. She seemed so dainty, so quiet and sweet, that for a moment he found himself able to imagine that it was all a dream; that hers was just one of those fairy, disquieting voices that floated about on the summer breeze and rippled along the valleys and hillsides of his Cumberland home. Then, swift as the fancy itself, came the warm touch of her hand upon his, the lure of her voice once more, with its trembling cadence.
"Why are you so foolish?" she murmured. "Louise is very wonderful in her place, but she is not what you want in life. Has it never occurred to you that you may be too late?"
"What do you mean?" he demanded.
"I believe what the world believes, what some day I think she will admit to herself—that she cares for the Prince of Seyre."